Arrived in TO

Vacation (that would be the flight!) over!

I am slightly alarmingly tired

For this time of year and the change...friends in TO, I'm going to have to take it a little easy this year at the beginning!

Maybe I'll sleep on the plane?  Here's hoping for a good night's sleep tonight.

Changing out the sink...una pica nova

Don't have time to find a picture of the old sink, but lets just say it was unhygenic and deteriorated, then there was a hole.

Surprise surprise, it was hollow underneath!

The little hole is the old drain.

Bigger than we'd thought

a closer look down the drain - this blog is always scintillating isn't it!  Had I known that was the size of the drain, as in I could have fit my fist in it, I wouldn't have been so worried about clogging it.

the wall without the sink, end of day 1

The new (to us) marble sing goes in....

and all the new surfaces are in place, but the tiles in the corner need to be replaced, they were too cracked and damaged, we have more of the filler tiles you can see around the edges of the sink, but I am hoping for a closer match in colour tone and weight...so we're hanging in till I get a chance to go looking

Maybe tomorrow!

A good friend kindly gave us the sink, made out of a single piece of marble!

 I should have taken a photo just of it to show you!  Maybe tomorrow

Camí dels Enginyers!

Quina passada!  El millor excursion en la vida....podria ser!

Went walking on Sunday, one of the loveliest excursions yet!

Hmm, thinking ice may have nailed this at some point, no?

You can see the river in the middle, we came up on the right and now we are continuing up on the left

We walked along the base of that range in the back, then along the path in the foreground

Just showing how steep the route was all the way along, the views were INCREDIBLE

There are people coming up there, just below me, a steep bit.

Doesn't he look like a grumpy old general cast into stone.

Horses in the very far distance

A wee bit of unmelted snow, over a river of run off.

looking down, obviously,

Looking up

the underside as it melts away is incredibly architectural.

we went along to the divide into the Vall de Nùria (where we didn't go) ...and then came down amongst the cows (including a bull!  He was interested in the lady cows though, not us, phew)

a lot of this water is chanelled off for use....

then we met a pack of horses who wanted to come up the route we were going down.  It is a very narrow route, and they are pretty wild....short legged and stocky mountain horses.  LOVELY beasts, and had foals with them.

Grazing in the sunshine...

Sweet, no?

High alpine fields......

a waterfall, that felt great on the feet......

Ahhhh, and stretching out for 10 minutes in the grass at the bottom......end of a lovely day.

I''m a lucky girl

Look what the man made for lunch the other day:


Homemade deep dish pizza!

And watermelon, too exciting, the picture got taken afterwards!

Short stories

I am not a big fan of short stories, and having read an entire book of them, I still feel the same way.

There's two parts to my ambivalence.  One is that so many writers feel they have to beat you firmly around the head in a short story, they have little time, so must pack enormous drama into it.

Feels kinda under-nuanced, like a sledgehammer.

Then there is the speed of it all, like being in one of those greeting lines, full of interesting people, but with whom you never get a chance to say more than a few words before the next one relentlessly pushes up the line, for a brief chat.

Sort of like those geese for foie gras...

kinda force fed.

That said, Murakami's book Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman that I read today, doesn't do the sledgehammer thing, he is nuanced.  Though that is also a problem.

I find that after I finish a book I don't really want to start another book that day, I need to take a breath and reflect a bit on it before I dive into the next.  I feel the same with a short story, but you don't get the chance.

Having had work today that involved hours of doing not very much, (ie lots of time to read) I read the whole book in one go.

Definitely feeling like someone is going to slaughter me for my overstuffed liver......

Wonderful, but so much so fast.

Back to the novel for me.

TP??? This is one way to reduce overheads

How do you get the paper out????

got a guess?